Volume 27 Issue 5, May 2024

As Nature Neuroscience celebrates its 25th anniversary, we are having conversations with both established leaders in the field and those earlier in their careers to discuss how the field has evolved and where it is heading. This month we are talking to Fernando de Castro Soubriet, principal investigator at the Instituto Cajal (Spain). He is a neurodevelopmental biologist who is actively involved in championing the history of neuroscience. He is among the group of Spanish scientists who ensured that the Archives of Santiago Ramón y Cajal and the Spanish Neurohistological School are registered as World Heritage with UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization). Here, we discuss science and the legacy of the Spanish Neurohistological School.

Nongenetic factors contribute to the onset, progression and severity of neurodegenerative diseases. Here, the authors describe how exposomics, the systematic analysis of environmental factors, can help neuroscientists understand these diseases.

Precise profiling of dendritic RNA regulation reveals how neuronal depolarization leads to ribosome switching onto short upstream open reading frames and new coding sequences to acutely modulate local protein synthesis.

Oligodendrocytes are vulnerable to chemical toxicity during development. However, few environmental chemicals have been identified as potential hazards. Here, the authors discover chemicals in common household products as harmful to oligodendrocyte development.

Brain region-specific oligodendrocyte population dynamics are unclear. Here the authors implement long-term in vivo three-photon imaging to determine those dynamics in the cortical and subcortical areas in the living intact and demyelinated adult mouse brain.

How genetic information in the germinal zone determines neuronal cell types is unclear. Here the authors show that MEIS2 plays an important role in determining GABAergic neuron diversity during development.

The role of TREM1 in neurodegenerative diseases is unclear. Here the authors show that TREM1 promotes cognitive decline in aging and in the context of amyloid pathology in a mouse model of Alzheimer disease.

Human microglia transplanted in the mouse brain mount a multipronged response to amyloid-β pathology, displaying unique transcriptional states. Alzheimer’s disease risk genes are differentially regulated across cell states and profoundly alter microglial function.

Hematopoietic cell transplantation (HCT) may be a promising therapy for treatment-refractory multiple sclerosis (MS). Mader et al. Describe beneficial effects of autologous HCT in a mouse model of MS and identify a myeloid transcriptional signature associated with neuroprotection.

The authors find that Piezo1 stimulation enhances meningeal lymphatics and boosts CSF drainage to treat hydrocephalus and ventriculomegaly, showing promise in Down syndrome and hydrocephalus models.

How astrocytes can integrate information is incompletely understood. Here the authors show that locus coeruleus-controlled calcium signals in hippocampal astrocytes propagating from their processes to their soma are involved in the information integration upon salient events.

Silva et al. definitively establish climbing fiber-driven complex spike events as essential instructive signals for associative cerebellar learning while also revealing unexpected features of optogenetic manipulation.

Chen et al. show that transitions to innate behaviors, such as feeding and social interaction, rely on their encoding during beta oscillations by neuron populations in the lateral hypothalamus, coordinated with the medial prefrontal cortex and ventral tegmental area.

How do multiple synapses interact to modulate learning? Agnes and Vogels postulate models of ‘co-dependent’ synaptic plasticity that promote rapid, multi-synaptic attainment of stable receptive fields, dendritic patterns and plausible neural dynamics.

Two fMRI studies (n = 358) show that cognitive regulation of negative emotion alters cortical activity but not amygdala or other subcortical areas. Regulation-related activity overlaps with emotion generation systems but also involves distinct areas.

Riveland and Pouget model instructed action, showing that shared structure in task and semantic representations allows language to compose practiced skills in novel settings. Models make predictions for neural activity in human language areas.

The Masonic Institute for the Developing Brain (MIDB) Precision Brain Atlas is a resource of personalized brain network topographies (n = 9,900). It also provides a probabilistic atlas and integration zones across diverse magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) datasets and ages. The atlas increases the reliability of brain-wide association studies (BWAS) and improves targeting for neuromodulation.

A real-time analysis system was developed for an up to 500-megabyte-per-second image stream. This system can extract activities from up to 100,000 neurons in larval zebrafish brains and enables closed-loop perturbations of brain-wide neural dynamics at cellular resolution.